‘It’s assumed, after living for 65 years, one has nothing to offer. The reverse is true. Actually we have some really good stories to tell’ … Steenburgen in Book Club
Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Book Club is a film that’s not really about a book club, it’s about four women, friends of very long standing, with no real need of a conceit to bring them together. “It’s deeply unusual,” says Mary Steenburgen, “to see four female leads, and it’s almost unheard of to see four leads over the age of 65. It’s rare even for young women get that opportunity, period. We kept being shocked that we were actually getting to do it.”

Steenburgen, herself barely 65, is speaking down the line from California. The youngest (by seven years) and the most arthouse of the strikingly premium cast, her career has not followed the regular arc: a blast of young fame, a period of obscurity, then a partial reprise for mum roles. She is remembered for The Help (2011) as much as she is for her early Oscar (for Melvin and Howard, in 1980). Despite her friendship with Hillary Clinton and her longstanding support for civil rights (she once said of Arkansas: “Growing up someplace like that, you either become committed toward bigotry or against it. You can’t really sit on the fence”), her countercultural reputation was sealed relatively recently, with regular appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm alongside real-life husband Ted Danson, to whom she’s been married since the 80s.

But Book Club is as mainstream as the book the club is reading. Fifty Shades of Grey has “got me in a total tizzy”, Steenburgen’s Carol, mashing up a 90s teen and a 50s housewife, tells Diane Keaton’s Diane. “I could have put him in jail for any one of these things,” Candice Bergen’s Sharon intones of the Fifty Shades hero, because she is a federal judge. “But she’s having fun,” Jane Fonda’s Vivian points out, because she’s the fun one.

Do older women still have friends, interests, autonomy? This is what it boils down to

Says Steenburgen of the atmosphere on set: “Everybody came to work hard. They were funny, and real, and I think part of what makes the movie work is that you see us genuinely becoming friends on screen, which we are and have been ever since.”

Keaton and Fonda are more household-namey, but there was no box-office hierarchy . “I don’t know that I’ve ever been a diva. I don’t think anybody has ever accused me of it, but maybe I’m kidding myself. I can tell you that it’s hard to believe that of any of them. I don’t know if it’s about being a woman, I don’t even know what the male equivalent is, but I don’t feel the accusation being levelled at men. We just have ugly words for female actors who are successful.”

It’s not where you’d come for insights into the Fifty Shades franchise, but to be fair, neither are the Fifty Shades films. If you’re looking for committed performances, they’re here, possibly because the premise is so refreshing that everyone was prepared to just blast through the bits that were, ahem, a little less than fresh.

“There’s the sexuality of it,” says Steenburgen, “but also just that people our age, you know, do new things. They try something they’ve never tried before, scare themselves to death, take a chance on love. When kids are young, we say to them: ‘You can do anything, don’t be afraid,’ and then there’s this mysterious unspoken moment where that is no longer true. And we don’t say it to ourselves. When Jane says in the film: ‘We’re not going to be people who stop living before we stop living.’ That very much is Jane Fonda. It’s perfect that that line came from her. But it’s true that all four of us felt that way.”

‘We didn’t take control of the vehicle, we’re too much old pros for that.’ Book Club. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures

Are old women still people? Do they still need physical intimacy, do they still have friends, interests, autonomy? This is what it boils down to. It’s not a bad question, and is so seldom asked. There is a lacuna more important even than sex, which is the absence of old women on screen with any definable self. They are always assigned either a rocking chair role (rock; dispense wisdom; recommence rocking) or what Stockard Channing once called a piñata part (be evil; get hit with a stick; explode colourfully).

Says Steenburgen: “For us, the movie was very personal, very true to how we feel about ageing. Just the assumption that when you’re that age, you’re going to be so different from this. It’s assumed, after living for 65 years, one has nothing to offer. The reverse is true. Actually we have some really good stories to tell.”

This would have been the time to cut in and ask for some of those stories, particularly since we’re talking about sexuality, and we’re post #MeToo, and the perspective of another generation would be extremely interesting: but she almost smells that question down the line, and rides right over it.

Too few films about older women and sex? Thank heavens for Book Club

Read more

“At the same time,” she hurries, “we’re all grownups, we feel grateful to the business, we’re not bitter about this stuff. We really want stuff to be the best it can be for women, but all four of us feel so grateful to be actors. I’ve paid my bills by being an actor since I was 24 years old. I feel blessed and lucky to do that.”

Apart from the patriarchy, there’s one, better reason for the invisibility of old women in mainstream culture: they are really hard to write. How do you observe the conventions of the romcom, the insecurities, the pride before the fall, the fear of intimacy, the pratfalls, while introducing people who – just from the look in their eyes, never mind the arthritis – have clearly seen a thing or two? How do you square the wisdom of your cast with the silliness that you need for people to keep breaking up and getting back together again? The stuff of romance, since the dawn of time, has been the misunderstanding, otherwise it’s just a lot of people snogging. This cast understands everything.

Yet, Steenburgen insists: “We didn’t take control of the vehicle, we’re too much old pros for that. Films don’t turn out well if you defy the director. There has to be somebody who’s thinking of all the stories at the same time and thinking of the overview. Where we were wild was in the garage of the house that we mainly shot in. All of our dogs were in there, and occasionally my husband, and we would just sit in there and tell the most hilarious stories about life in the business.” I’d watch that dialogue, in a shot: but Steenburgen is, as she says, a grownup and a pro. What happened in the garage stayed in the garage.